ESG use cases beyond energy

Hey friends,

Have you noticed that when our industry talks about ESG, they’re usually talking about energy efficiency improvements?

🙋‍♂️ I’m guilty as charged. It’s time for me to reframe my thinking, so I did a deep dive a few weeks back.

If you’re in need of a similar reframe, I’d recommend starting with financial risk. Think of ESG as a collection of risks to a real estate investment that weren’t historically taken into account by investors.

Before the ESG era, if a building wasted energy, investors (rationally) didn’t really care. As Carlos Flores of NABERS said on the podcast, it was an irrelevant hit to the bottom line. In the ESG era, a building that wastes energy is a risk. And ESG includes lots of other types of risks beyond energy waste.

You might think of it like concentric circles:

So what are all those other types of ESG risks? Here’s my chicken scratch diagram after my reading binge:

With that understanding, we can reframe how we think about (and communicate) technology use cases. How exactly can technology help reduce these risks?

This helps us communicate more clearly as we try and move the industry forward together. Too often, our conversations devolve into hand-waving and marketing fluff.

We can do better than ‘IoT for ESG’.